Litigation

Alan Beaman spent over a decade in prison after being wrongfully convicted of the 1993 murder of his ex-girlfriend. The MacArthur Justice Center represents Mr. Beaman in his lawsuit against the City of Normal and the three former Normal police officers who orchestrated the wrongful conviction.

Terry v. United States—a case before the U.S. Supreme Court—sought to correct the unfair and incorrect exclusion of low-level crack offenders from relief clearly provided by the bipartisan First Step Act, passed by Congress in 2018. The United States reversed its position in this case, and filed a brief supporting our position. The Court appointed an amicus...

In June 2021, the Supreme Court denied our petition for certiorari. The Stewart family continues their fight for justice and to hold accountable the officers who killed Luke Stewart. A cartoon of a police officer beating an unarmed civilian (caption: “protecting and serving the poop out of you”); a clip from a Chris Rock sketch...

In Abraham v. Corizon, the Oregon Supreme Court will decide whether Corizon and other for-profit healthcare providers are bound by the Oregon Public Accommodations Law—an ADA analogue that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. To help the state high court answer that question, MJC filed an amici brief on behalf of Disability Rights Oregon, the ACLU...

We represent Adham Hassoun, a stateless Palestinian man who the government is trying to imprison indefinitely—potentially for the rest of his life—under the USA Patriot Act. This is the first time that the government has invoked a highly controversial provision of the PATRIOT Act that purports to allow the government to hold people in detention...

On February 27, 2019, the MacArthur Justice Center obtained a major victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in Garza v. Idaho. In an opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court recognized that a criminal defendant has the constitutional right to an appeal where his defense attorney improperly forfeited it, and that this right...

Joey Chandler committed murder in 2003, when he was 17. He is currently in prison in Mississippi, serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole. If any juvenile offender can demonstrate rehabilitation, it is Joey Chandler. His disciplinary record over more than a decade of his incarceration has been virtually spotless. He has availed...

In this case, the en banc Seventh held, over the dissent of three judges, that a mere parking infraction justifies a pretextual search. The dissenting judges warned that the decision gives police the power to seize people for “parking while black” and that “the police tactics here would never be tolerated in more affluent neighborhoods.” The MacArthur Justice Center is challenging the decision in the United States Supreme Court.

At every stage in the litigation against that ban (which the President had often characterized as the “Muslim Ban”) the MacArthur Justice Center ensured that judges had before them a full record of President Trump’s hatred of people of the Muslim faith, his open desire to curtail their rights, and his specific, sustained promise to inhibit their entry to the United States.

In Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, the MacArthur Justice Center stood up for the rights of protesters in an amicus brief, showing that the mere existence of probably cause does not justify an arrest in retaliation for speech. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, holding 8-1 that at least in some circumstances, probable cause does not excuse a retaliatory arrest.